Tag Archives: writing

I don’t know if what I’m experiencing is writer’s block, exactly…but I’m having trouble with moving forward on the stories I have started. I’m just not sure where to go with them.

One is what I refer to as my “Addison Falls” horror story. It features a teacher who moves to the strange town of Addison Falls, with its assortment of odd characters. It’s a town where lots of strange things have happened over the years, and it definitely has a history. And its residents seem to overlook the bad things that are happening in their midst. It’s like, stuff just doesn’t register for them. Even when their kids are disappearing. But it registers with the teacher, and it registers with the young reporter who has been a resident for four years now. So they investigate…

The second is a space opera. I started out just trying to write the opening scenes of a movie. A lone pilot, searching through space for salvageable debris, happens across a derelict spacecraft. It is of alien design, and the pilot boards it and discovers that it isn’t totally empty. It carries within a single passenger, one who is asleep in cryostasis. And some bad folks are looking for this passenger, and they aren’t of this galaxy. Yet they are very human…

Those are the two I’ve been working on. I also have my 90K word post-apocalyptic novel going, but I needed a break from it. Maybe I should try again on that one. And then there’s this college horror novel that I was working on, featuring a girl who has transferred mid-term to a university because of some bad stuff that happened to her/around her at her previous large university. And luckily for her, there is an opening in one of the dorms, because the co-ed was found murdered off-campus. But unluckily for her, her death is linked back to this dorm.

Anyway, I have ideas about how they’re all going to end, but getting past the point I’m at right now seems to be a real challenge. I don’t seem to have the creative juices to move forward on any of the stories.

I wrote this story for a contest back in September of 1996, and found it in my archives a few days ago. I did a very minimal amount of rewriting but didn’t change too much. I’d write it differently today, probably, but I don’t think it’s terrible for flash fiction from my earliest days of attempting to write. If you’d like to read it, click the link at the bottom of the post:

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THE BAD COP

“If you open your mouth again, I’ll have to shut it for you.” The man in the police uniform spoke in a low voice, intending to intimidate Joe, and the rest of us were too cowed by the badge to interfere. We all watched silently as Joe backed down.

It wasn’t every day that a cop showed up at a party and started hitting on our female friends. No one knew what to make of it. So we had ignored him, for the most part. After all, cops are the good guys. We’d just partied on, like he wasn’t there, or like his presence was a normal thing.

But that was before he’d started hitting on Joe’s girlfriend…

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If you’d like to read the rest of this story, please click here: THE BAD COP

A while back, I was speaking with my retired MD friend, who is in the process of writing his memoirs. From his description of what he was trying to accomplish, these memoirs are going to be sort of a combination of a biography and a philosophical treatise. He was bemoaning his view that the young people of today don’t have a clue what is coming at them in the future. He also suggested that there are no philosophers out there today helping to shape thought.

That’s an interesting observation, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. Is it true? I just don’t know. I recall back to my own time at Jesuit Loyola of Chicago, where I was required to take 9 hours of philosophy and 9 hours of theology. (I sort of cheated on the philosophy hours – “Logic” counted as a philosophy credit, and I had it in MATH in high school, and was good at those equations. So I took it and aced it. Didn’t feel much like philosophy to me, though…) Who did we study? Well, there were guys like Hume and Kierkegaard, and there was a guy named Mortimer Adler, who wrote the main book we studied, a volume titled The Difference Of Man and The Difference It Makes. Adler may or may not have some association with University of Chicago, and I think he’s still around and still writing.

I’m removed from the academic arena by over 30 years now, and I don’t know what is taught in a philosophy course today. And should philosophy be just about reading what the old thinkers wrote? Or should it be about developing your own philosophy? Learning what that means? Learning how to critically look at an issue and decide what is important about it?

I tend to think that perhaps the pop philosophers of today and of recent vintage are writing fiction as much as they’re writing non-fiction. After all, where else can a thinker work out the issues, speculate on the outcomes if one course of action is taken, explore options, even look at past events in a different light? “Speculative Fiction” is a name I’ve heard applied to some science fiction, and what is that if not an almost philosophical exploration of choices and outcomes?

The trouble is, this sort of “philosophy” isn’t considered serious. It’s ‘just’ genre fiction, it’s just made up stuff.

Still, I think some important thinking can be found in SF books. We’ve often heard the description “a cautionary tale” of a particular story, and that to me is at least a form of practical philosophy.

I’ve just been busy. And when I’ve had time to write, it’s been mostly spent editing three separate works. And now, all three are very close to being released for Kindle. Here are the titles:

ODD MAN OUT – a 32K novella which is expanded from the short story of the same name

NEVER ENDING NIGHT – a 27K horror novella

RECIPROCAL EVIL – an almost-50K short horror novel

As I mentioned, ODD MAN OUT started life as an 1800 word short story, released as an ebook combined with the short story HOUSE AT THE BEND IN THE ROAD. Both stories can also be found in the collection 14 DARK WINDOWS. I thought that ODD MAN OUT would make a good novella, or at least a much longer short story (sort of how DEAD OR ALIVE, originally a 2400 word short story, became a 7600 word short story on the rewrite). It ended up coming in at over 30K words, and tells the story of how the main character (not named in the short version, but named Paul in this longer version) comes to be…well, maybe I shouldn’t spoil it. Suffice it to say that a weekend retreat with college friends doesn’t go the way Paul wants it to when he brings his fiancee for the first time. His friend Roger wants her, and he’ll go to any extreme lengths to get her.

NEVER ENDING NIGHT was inspired by a Richard Laymon story I read (but can’t recall the title of) where a night goes on and on. I thought about something like that — what if night never ended in a suburban town? So I started writing from the POV of a high school girl (age 15) and it started as a diary kept by the girl where she rambles about her friends and her family and about what’s going on in their neighborhood when the sun just doesn’t come out one morning. Then I interspersed those diary entries through the third person narrative, which alternates between the girl’s POV and some of the neighbors’ POV’s. Bad things happen when the masks of some people in the neighborhood come off when they believe that some sort of apocalypse is coming and the rule of law has broken down…

The last, RECIPROCAL EVIL, is about a college kid, Chris, who experiences a campus murder as a dream, and is surprised to find out that the dream really happened. Why is he sharing dreams with some serial killer? He’s drawn further in when his girlfriend’s roommate disappears. And when the killer contacts him, he learns some things about his own background, about his family, and about his younger sister, believed to be traveling the world and having the time of her life. But is that true? And who is the killer’s next target?

There you have it. Three soon-to-be-released novellas/novels. See, I haven’t been completely idle in terms of my writing!

Chuck Wendig put up a challenge to write a piece of flash fiction, around 2000 words, choosing one of the titles he provided. So here’s my try at it. It’s an odd piece, and I may try to rework it in the future, because I sort of like some of the ideas in it. But I probably wrote this one in less than two hours… I hope you can enjoy it!

THE GOBLET OF LOST CHICAGO

As the pair waited on the platform for the elevated train to arrive, the girl pointed to a sign on the opposite platform.

“What’s that mean, Grandpa?” she asked the older man standing next to her.

He strained his eyes to read the advertisement. “The Goblet of Lost Chicago…hmm. I never heard of it, Brie.”

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(To read this story, look under the tab “Free Stories” above, or click this link…)

I haven’t disappeared. I just haven’t had anything much to post on the blog. But I have been writing a bit, and reading quite a bit. So I thought that I’d just sort of list some of the things I’ve been working on, and give a couple of shout-outs to books I’ve read as well.

I finished up a 27K horror novella called NEVER ENDING NIGHT. Actually, it’s been finished for a while, but I finally went back and reread it and formatted it for uploading. I played with some covers but I’m not sure I like them.

I’ve been writing on a post-apocalyptic tale that started life as a piece being written in Hugh Howey’s WOOL universe. I finished the first part, about a group of college students who get wind of an upcoming “event” and try to build a shelter to wait it out. Then, as I wrote that part, one of the college kids up and left without explanation, then so did her boyfriend, so I wrote their story as they are invited to a shelter in Texas. Then I thought, nothing is 100% fatal except nerve gas, and so I made this one, like, 99.8% fatal, and another story I had started a while ago ended up being a story of some of the few survivors of this biological agent. I’ve been writing on that one. It’s been fun to tell these stories.

Also a while ago, I decided to expand ODD MAN OUT into a longer story, perhaps a novella or a short novel. So I’ve been working on that one somewhat diligently. I’m around 21,500 words now (the original story was something around 1800 words, I think).

Then I started something set in the fictional upstate NY community of Addison Falls. The shared world comes from back in the 1990’s when a bunch of us on a Delphi forum called The Horror Discussion Group created a bunch of common characters along with our own original characters in order to write stories set in this world. Well, the stories (for the most part) died when the forum became inactive after the host (Bookhound) passed away at a very young age. I have a story in my DIE 6 collection that was written back around that time in Addison Falls (THE GHOST TRAIN), and I thought that it might be fun to write a novel set in that town. I decided to once again do missing kids, but this time I am going to focus on a math teacher at the high school and his friend/something more(?) newspaper reporter. I’ve written about 18K words in that story, and I’ve been adding to it a little at a time. No end is in sight.

Last, I started a story back in the late 1980’s that was also postapocalyptic, set in a small Wisconsin town after a disease claims all the adults. I decided to expand that one as well, including three more settings, and bouncing back and forth between the four places to tell the story of kids coming together and conflicting in each. I now call it INHERIT THE EARTH, and I think it’s pretty interesting. (I tossed out all the boring parts and rewrote most of it.) I think it stands at something around 20K or maybe a bit more. No end in sight on this one, either.

Reading: I’ve knocked out some pretty good books. I read all of Kate Wrath’s E series, five books in all. I finished Orson Scott Card’s VISITORS and Paul Draker’s NEW YEAR ISLAND (wish I would have tried that one sooner, because it was really good). I read William Malmborg’s Halloween homage, SANTA TOOK THEM, and J. Stirling Robertson’s SEPSIS. Then I finished two or three Robert Crais books, including the non-Pike, non-Cole book SUSPECT. Lots of good reads in there. Those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head and skimming the Kindle.

I hope to be a bit more active here in the future. And I hope to have a new book announcement soon.

I could have titled this post “What stops me from reading,” but I haven’t found too many things where I just set something aside and say “the heck with that one.” Which is to say that I finish most of what I start. As a wannabe-writer, I read articles and blogs when they deal with craft, and a common theme seems to be that we need to keep our foot on the pedal throughout our works of genre fiction. Is that true? I’ve been thinking about it after reading Joe Hill’s NOS4A2. Because as I read that book, there were a few times early on where I almost set it aside and moved onto something else.

Why? Well, if you read my review on Goodreads of the book, you’d see that I felt there were times the author, like his father Stephen King, bogged himself down in narrative details that were designed to add richness to the setting, to the character, to the plot. But unlike his father, every instance of this in Hill’s novel did NOT work. They just pulled away from the main thrust of the story. I can’t get specific on it, because 1.) I don’t have the book with me and 2.) I didn’t take any notes. I just knew that I was considering putting the book down without finishing. (I’ve had that feeling in Hill’s father’s works as well, notably recently with UNDER THE DOME.)

So I started thinking about what I, as a reader (a former VORACIOUS reader who did about ten books a month, currently a less voracious type who maybe does three or four books a month), look for as I read. What keeps me reading? I already stated that one thing that MIGHT stop me from reading is having too much extraneous detail added into the narrative. Another might be an inconsistent plotline.

So far, I haven’t thrown anything across the room for grammatical/typographical errors. (Good thing, too, because I’m reading so much on my Kindle and it might break if I threw it.) So I think I can safely rule them out as what makes me stop reading. And the converse, that it is excellent grammar and absolutely clean, perfect typing that would KEEP me reading, is also out. I believe that these things appear or disappear based on the reader’s (my) involvement in the story. If a story has really pulled me in, I tend to skip over the grammatical/typographical errors. Now, I admit that I haven’t really found a single work that is LOADED with the things (apparently contrary to Amazon’s reviews, which seem to find typos everywhere they look in a lot of indie fiction…are those people who are actually reading, or are they people from big publishing houses and bookstores and such who have an axe to grind against indie writers?). Most every book has a few. Some more than others. No pattern as to whether it’s more prevalent in trad-published fiction or in self-published fiction. Most pass by my eyes while registering in a very superficial way with my brain. (Like, “oh, they meant ‘wind’ and not ‘mind.’ Got it.)

Yet, I can definitely notice differences in what keeps me reading. What calls to me when I put it down, making me want to get back to it as soon as possible. What I can leave for days or weeks at a time and come back to it, not feeling much urgency. And mostly, I feel it comes down to plot.

If an author gives me a compelling plot, I’ll keep reading. If I have to know what happens next, I will think about the story until I can get back to it. Story by itself isn’t enough. I think that there are stories in everything. Plot is what makes them compelling. The difference between these two might be summed up by this quote:

A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order.

A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.

(The quote is from Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft 5th ed. Longman, 2000, by Janet Burroway, and paraphrases E.M. Forster.)

The best history gives us both story and plot. The most boring history simply gives us the story of what happened. So I can fully agree with this quote. I forgive a lot when a plot sucks me in and makes me want to read until I can’t keep my eyes open or I’m finished, whichever comes first.

But what about characters? What if you have a great plot, but you’ve put the most boring characters in it that you can imagine? Is it still compelling?

I would suggest that you need both. Plot is first, but the characters cannot be cardboard cutouts. This is not to say that everyone needs to be a superhero, or a CIA spy, or something like that. In fact, in my opinion, there is something compelling about reading a character who is ordinary. Someone about whom you as a reader might say, “I know people like this guy or girl.” That’s what works for me.

Great characters with a less-than-compelling plot will be less readable, for me, than a great plot with okay characters. You have to care about the characters, but you also have to be interested in the situation they find themselves in.

The third important element for me is setting. I’ve often felt that setting can almost act as another character in a novel. Stephen King does that as good as anyone. As I read his early novel SALEM’S LOT, I came to know the community of Jerusalem’s Lot as well as I knew Ben Mears or Barlow or any of the other characters in the book. It’s the same with other King novels as well. Castle Rock and Derry became almost-characters in King’s fiction, staple settings that worked for multiple stories, and their quirks and their denizens were almost as important as the actual characters.

That said, setting as an element of fiction falls to third in importance. While masterful description of setting is a huge asset to a story, a generic setting doesn’t kill said story IF the characters and the plot are there.

When I review books, I tend to try to look at them in this manner. I try to mention all three of these elements in the review, and discuss whether they were great, good or average. (If they’re bad, I usually don’t bother reviewing the book. I usually don’t like to say anything bad about a book. The exception is those authors, like King, Koontz, Coben, etc etc, who have a track record, and whose works I find myself comparing to other works by themselves and not so much to other works by other authors. Often, I think that a second tier King or Coben novel is better than some novels which I’ve given high marks to, but how can I rate UNDER THE DOME or THE WOODS the same as the best novels by those authors?)

So in summary, for me, it’s:

PLOT

CHARACTERS

SETTING

So why can’t I seem to finish DROOD by Dan Simmons, whose works I normally love? I don’t think it’s the characters or the setting, so it must be the plot. Unless the pacing is dragging it down so far for me that I can’t seem to bring myself to resume reading it… Length can be daunting, and if you don’t see an end in sight, it can be hard to pick up something that’s really dragging for you. The aforementioned books by King and Hill both have that issue with length.

But maybe that’s a discussion for a different day, and a different post.

Also, there is the promise that a book makes as I read it. If it doesn’t live up to that promise; if it ends up being something other than what I believe it is based on the promise it makes with its descriptions, its cover, its early chapters, even its characters and setting…again, maybe that is a different post. And is about as close as I can get to craft, since I’m a far more accomplished reader than I am a writer (whether I’m a critical enough reader is debatable, but it is what it is…)

Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t done so, go buy one of my books and see if I live up to the things I talk about in this post. 🙂

My book THE INN now has 4 reviews (three of which have text), all 5-star ratings. J. Michael Major, author of ONE MAN’S CASTLE, had this to say about it:

Talk about the band trip from hell! Young and beautiful student teacher Kimberly Bouton rides along with the high school band from Minnesota to Alabama. But one of the stops along the way is an inn where creepy things have started to occur. Miss Bouton and other band members wake up sore and with headaches. Is someone at the inn abusing the women in their sleep? Dyson cleverly weaves a great tale with events in the news that quickly escalate out of control. Filled with twists and turns, you won’t want to put this one down!

(Check out his book, for a good serial killer book that focuses on some interesting issues!)

Another reader identified as “Anne” posted this about the book:

Really enjoyed this short but scary read. Extremely well-written — and difficult to put down. The characters were compelling, and the suspense was thrilling. A perfect story for a night by the fire.

It was nice to hear that a reader thought it was extremely well-written. I try…

And finally, Steven M. Moore, author of too many books to count, including his latest, FAMILY AFFAIRS, wrote this about it on his blog:

Scott Dyson, author (Deadlock Press, 2015). Is this the longest story I’ve read by Mr. Dyson? It’s a novella, and there’s a lot of horror, mystery, suspense, and thrills in these few pages. I loved it, and It’s not a genre I often read (the horror part). No zombies, vampires, or werewolves (thank God!), just one seemingly ordinary human being doing horrible things to other human beings. Some scenes reminded me of Hayton’s novel Breathe and Release reviewed here and that real life atrocity with the three girls in Ohio.

The band director, his student teacher (a woman not much older than the students), and the band are on a road trip. They plan to perform and then spend a day at a nearby amusement park, crashing two nights in the inn. I can’t say much more without writing spoilers, but I will send out a warning: if you were a member of a high school band, any nostalgia might fly out the window as your read this. Or, some readers might say, “This is a lot more exciting than our band trips were.” Mr. Dyson’s writing is fresh and original. Fans of the genre will enjoy this one. (Rating? How would you rate the TV show Dexter?)

So there are three very positive reviews of THE INN. Thanks to those reviewers for taking the time to read and review it!

Here’s another from Mit Sandru, author of the VLAD vampire series and TIME HOLE, among others:

This is another fine novel written by Scott Dyson. While reading I had to remind myself that I wasn’t reading a Stephen King or Dean Koontz horror novel, but and equally well written book by Scott.

I love it! I’ve been compared to King and Koontz! Two of the best ever, in my opinion!

I thought I’d toss some stuff up here about the background of writing THE INN. I flew through it; the story seemed to write itself. I went back and added in the material about St. Louis and the store where my main character purchases the flute pendant after the first draft was completed. I tried to give a little more depth to the parent-chaperones, who were barely mentioned in the first draft. And I fleshed out a few of the students a bit more in the narrative, making them more than just names that passed by in the story.

The idea to write it came after I finished a book called TEXT MESSAGE by William Malmborg. In that book, Malmborg describes a college student who loses her younger sister at the mall, and then begins receiving text messages from her sister’s phone telling her to do embarrassing things (mostly of a sexual nature) or bad things will happen to the sister. When the girl refuses, the bad guy (girl?) texts a photo of the sister with a finger cut off. So the girl follows instructions to the letter, and…well, it goes on from there.

I thought, after reading it, that I could probably write something similar, and started thinking about storylines. I thought of a motel or an inn (instead of a school or a mall) where bad things happen, and then I flashed back to a recurring concern I have when I’m in a motel room — that somehow they have surveillance cameras in the rooms. I mean, how would you know unless you start tearing the room apart?

It so happened that band trips came to mind, and I combined the two things — a band trip to a motel with something of that nature in some of the rooms. I recalled certain things about my own band trips as a high school student, and about more current band trips and how they are organized, and out came the story.

It ended up being something around 37,000 words, give or take. After about six months of polishing, getting input from my beta reader, and repolishing, I finally came up with an idea for the cover. I searched out images that would fit what I was picturing, and I think what I came up with is pretty close to my original idea.

It hasn’t sold well…two copies in October and eleven copies in September, at least at Amazon.com (not sure about the other Amazons in the UK or other countries), but it’s been getting some KU page reads — over a thousand last month and over five hundred so far this month. My shorter novella THE CAVE (about 25,000 words) has been read in KU a few times as well, although it has only sold one copy in two months.

So that’s the long story behind THE INN. I’m currently working on a long version of ODD MAN OUT, and am polishing a couple of other things that are done.

Looking forward to getting some more things out. Till then, try one of my other books! They’re still all only $0.99, which is a huge bargain. (THE INN is going to go up to $1.99 soon…)

Oh, and do yourself a service and read FAMILY AFFAIRS, TIME HOLE, and ONE MAN’S CASTLE. All three are excellent books!

I tend to write this blog as conversationally as I can — like I’m talking to a friend. So even though I’m probably not talking to too many people (I really don’t know how many visitors I get because I’ve never set up that JetPack thing) I figured I’ll continue in this style and drop a quick note about my weekend.

Every year a group of friends heads up to northern Wisconsin for a weekend of playing music and enjoying the water (if it’s warm) and the colors (if it’s late enough and conditions are favorable) and eating and drinking and just relaxing. This past weekend was that weekend, and I went up there for the first time in about 4 years. Besides playing (I do keyboards, guitar and a bit of drums) I took some time to write. Sometimes I even got in a couple of hours of writing in the day.

I got in enough writing that I actually finished a YA/MG novel I started with my son a long time ago. As I reread, I note places that need to be filled in, but I haven’t even started with that. I’m just trying to get a sense of whether the story holds together.

It’s interesting that two of the projects I’ve finished are two of my longest projects and both started in my son’s imagination — not in my own imagination. I honestly think that his imagination is a lot better than mine. Whenever I hit a snag, I’d ask him where it was going. He’d sometimes come up with something so out-there and off-course that I’d veto it. But usually he’d give me a sense of what he saw happening and it would work. He’ll be getting co-writing credits on both of these, though, due to the nature of some of my horror, I may use a different name for this stuff. It’s a complete departure from the horror I write. Not sure I want any overlap on readership. I won’t keep either a secret. The pen-name will have a menu header up at the top, I think, and I’ll post something every time I add a page to it, but I’ll try to keep them as separate as I can.

Oh, and we watched a Cubs loss and a Cubs victory over the St. Louis Cardinals. After two more victories at home, we’ve vanquished the Cards and we’re in the NLCS for the first time since 2003, and that was the first time in history that we’d been in that position. Can’t wait to see if Back To The Future 2 was accurate in its prediction!

I’m wondering if readers even notice this. I know that I didn’t until it was pointed out to me in the editing phase of my story “Playing Man” (which was published in QUANTUM ZOO). I was informed by D.J. Gelner, my editor (who did an outstanding job, by the way) that the convention was to place the dialog tag at the end of the sentence, and it should be “Bob said,” instead of “said Bob.” For example:

“I really want to try playing that Beatles song,” Rich said.

“Which one? There are a million of them!” Peter said.

“Let’s do them all,” Carter suggested.

Is that qualitatively better than the alternative:

“I really want to try playing that Beatles song,” said Rich.

“Which one? There are a million of them!” said Peter.

“Let’s do them all,” suggested Carter.

To me, they both read the same. I read the tag and it vaguely registers as an identification of the speaker. After being informed of the accepted (or proper?) way to write it, I started noticing, and while most fiction, especially indie fiction, does it the “right” way, Orson Scott Card’s book RUINS mixed them up indiscriminately. And so do I, in most of my fiction. As I read my short stories and longer works, I find both forms used, with no rhyme or reason to the usage except for the rhythm of the words in my head.

In other words, if it sounded right one way, I wrote it that way. And vice versa.

I don’t know if it is “wrong” to do it that way, so I’ve been trying to make everything conform to D.J.’s rules. But if I miss one, forgive me.